Over 300,000 to lose internet access as FBI shuts off servers

The move comes after the FBI seized a number of servers in November 2011 as part of raids to break up a criminal gang who used viruses to infect more than four million computers.

The FBI is to switch off servers used by cyber criminals

Web searches carried out by the victims of the gang were routed through these servers so that they saw adverts which led to the gang being paid, with many machines still containing the gang’s code.

The cyber criminals managed to make $14 million (£9 million) through the scam and ever since the FBI has worked with many ISPs and security firms to alert victims as to whether their PC was infected with the malware, known as DNS Changer.

The actual impact on computers is expected to be ‘minimal’ because many of the systems that were infected are no longer being used.

Sean Sullivan, a security researcher at F-Secure told the BBC: ‘Initially some domains will be cached which will mean web access will be spotty.

‘People will be confused about why some things work and some do not.’

According to figures from the DNS Changer Working Group, four million machines were originally infected, but that number has been reduced to 300,000.